SXSW Expands Internationally Amid US Uncertainty

South by Southwest, the decades-old tech, music and innovation festival, recently wrapped up its 2025 edition in Austin.

The popular event, which sees around 50,000 to 55,000 festival goers each year over about eight days, has yet to recuperate to pre-pandemic levels in terms of sales and profitability. It’s also expanding abroad as uncertainty in the U.S. is leaving potential attendees ill at ease to travel to the country.

SXSW, as the event is also known, will hold its third annual Sydney event in October, and its first London gathering in June. Management’s also looking at the possibility of hosting a festival in São Paulo—Brazilians have represented the largest single international contingent at the Austin event over the past several years. Some 23% to 28% of attendees come from abroad each year.

Hugh Forrest, president and chief programming officer at SXSW, said it’s too soon to provide numbers from this year’s SXSW, but did point to a big change in the most recent event compared to pre-pandemic and even last year’s: no one complained to him about rooms being so crowded that they couldn’t get in to see their desired speaker.

“We’re seeing less individual purchasers of badges, and more corporate purchases of badges, and combine that with, there’s a lot of uncertainty in the corporate world of what’s happening next. Are we going with tariffs? Are we not going with tariffs?” Forrest told AMO in an interview prior to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff announcements on Wednesday. “That all equates to a little bit of pullback on ancillary events, such as traveling to a conference.”

Forrest isn’t the only event organizer concerned about the uncertainty driven by fresh tariffs and border crossing crackdowns. At the Society of Independent Show Organizers in Austin this week, companies of all sizes expressed concern that their shows would see lower attendance with a poll showing that 27% of industry stakeholders surveyed are uncertain about their event participation because of the uncertainty of tariffs. Some 54% of international attendees and exhibitors surveyed said they are uncertain about their event participation for the same reason.

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Forrest said that having fewer people at the event makes for a better experience. Still, SXSW failed to pull in some sponsors for 2025, though they did have Rivian as a presenting sponsor for the first time. He is hopeful that in a year, people will have become accustomed to the uncertainty.

Forrest said: 

On the other hand, uncertainty is uncertainty, and maybe you never get accustomed to this. We have to be realistic for South by Southwest and understand that the chaos, uncertainty that’s coming out of Washington DC, will probably impact our international growth over the next three years, and international growth has been huge to us.

The company is trying to be realistic and attract more domestic attendees but also work with the U.S. government to see if they can make it easier to bring people to Austin next March.

“The landscape is changing so quickly that it’s hard to know what to do,” Forrest said.

While a SXSW would be compelling in Brazil, “we also want to be very careful, very strategic, very long term planning in terms of our expansion, simply because the Sydney and London events have ton of potential, but they need a lot of nurturing to grow before we start planning the garden elsewhere, so to speak.”

In fact, there’s an appetite to build smaller and maybe shorter events in various locations around the world, and Forrest expects to hold more of those this year and into next. SXSW has actually done events elsewhere in the past, but they were operated out of Austin, and didn’t quite work out. They now have 40 people each in London and Sydney to handle the local events and create a gathering that reflects the culture of the respective cities.

“Why and how Austin has remained compelling and relevant for 30 years is that we reflect the creativity and innovation in Austin, Texas, and the different areas of content, the different industries that we cover, generally parallel what is happening in Austin Texas,” Forrest said.

SXSW’s three buckets of revenue include badge sales, sponsors and trade show booths and other advertising. The company saw steep hockey stick of growth in the early 2010s, but that growth has been much slower post-pandemic.

“We were probably unrealistically optimistic about how quickly events like South by Southwest would rebound from the pandemic and throw in the uncertainty of the current political climate,” Forrest said. “We’re not at the level of profitability that we were pre-pandemic.”

That said, Forrest feels like what SXSW brings to the table is more relevant than ever with artificial intelligence and how we will eventually use that and what it means for humans and humanity.

“How do we find meaning when computers can do so much? The fact that this has always been our focus at South by Southwest positions as well, for now and for the future,” Forrest said. “ So much of what we do is the anti-AI. It’s human creativity. It’s the power of humans to solve problems in creative, non-intuitive ways, and that’s what we’ve done really well, is just provide a forum, provide a platform where those kinds of connections, those kinds of conversations, can take place.”